Promotion of Democracy as Popular Demand? [2000]

One of the continuities linking the foreign policies of the Bush and Clinton administrations was support for expanding the ‘zone of democracy’. Both of the post-cold war presidents used State of the Union addresses and many other vehicles to promote the proposition that this goal could provide one of the foundations of American foreign policy, much as containment of Soviet expansionism did during four and a half decades after World War II. ¹